There is great controversy with this year’s COP held in Azerbaijan. Not only from a climate perspective, as Azerbaijan is a major exporter of gas and oil accounting for over 90% of the country’s export revenue. But also other perspectives more usually seen as outside the scope of climate justice. These are related to military expansionism, authoritarianism, settler colonialism and denial of indigenous people’s rights to self-determination. That the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) even considered Azerbaijan a suitable host for this year’s conference sends a signal to many Armenians, that it is not to be taken seriously.
An incriminating fact that Azerbaijan and its partner state, Turkey — do not want people to know – is that it is Israel’s largest oil supplier. Forty percent of oil for jets, tanks, and other military vehicles in the genocide against Palestinians and the destruction of Lebanon is sourced from Azerbaijan via Turkey. How can such a country host the world’s largest climate conference? When it is so involved in the attempted, systematic extermination of an entire population of indigenous people?
This is not the only recent campaign of ethnic cleansing Azerbaijan is immersed in. In December 2022, Azerbaijan manufactured a fake eco-protest at the Lachin Corridor. The sole aim was to create a blockade to hold an entire population of 120,000 indigenous Artsakh Armenians under siege. Azerbaijan sent fake eco-protestors armed with signs with shoddy clip art saying banal things like “save nature” and “stop pollution”. Experts denounced this protest as the cynical deployment of environmental concerns aimed at the destruction of a people on their homeland.
Only months later in Azerbaijan, a real eco-protest launched by villagers in Azerbaijan in Söyüdlü emerged responding to gold mining operations that would pollute the villagers’ water supply. Videos of Azerbaijani batoned security services beating up old women, and villagers being blockaded proliferated on social media. Did those earlier fake eco-protestors blockading Armenians at the Lachin Corridor express or show solidarity to their countrymen in Söyüdlü, where a real ecological crisis was unfolding? No. That only exposed the dirty tactics the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan uses. It attempts to galvanize international support to blockade an entire indigenous population of Armenians in their historic home, Artsakh, by using ‘environmental speak’.
Despite the exposed hypocrisy of the Aliyev regime, the Artsakh Armenians endured a brutal blockade which inevitably rendered living conditions unsustainable. Shut off from the world with no food coming in, famine was widespread. Hospitals ran out of vital medical supplies. The rate of miscarriages tripled due to malnutrition. Children were subsisting on one potato for an entire day, their parents often on even less. To maintain the harsh conditions and pressure on the 120,000 Artsakh Armenians held under siege, Armenian farmers were routinely shot at while trying to harvest their crops in attempts to alleviate shortages in the food supply.
Armenians in Artsakh starved, while Aliyev and Azerbaijani spokespeople, cynically lied proclaiming: “there is no blockade”. Journalists reported the deteriorating conditions in Artsakh from inside the blockade. But their reports were skeptically called biased. Yes, Artsakh Armenians held under the blockade were considered unfit to report on their own suffering in the eyes of the international press. That press assigned ‘equal weight’ to the Artsakh Armenians, a starved and beleaguered population facing an existential crisis, and the words of an authoritarian, petro-dictatorship who had suppressed press freedom and had an abysmal human rights record.
As the Artsakh Armenians continued to resist, finally Azerbaijan had had enough. In September 2023, they orchestrated a massive bombing campaign to drive out the besieged indigenous Armenians from their homeland of two thousand years. This culminated in an ethnic cleansing the world witnessed.
And here we are, a year later, with Azerbaijan hosting the world’s largest climate conference. The region Artsakh, newly ethnically cleansed last year, is now promoted as — we’re not joking — a future, hi-tech “green energy zone”. This should alarm all climate justice and environmental activists, and deserves round condemnation and rejection.
The way we see it, there are two roads to go down. Either:
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a genuine climate justice movement that takes indigenous peoples’ rights, their homes and their systems of knowledge seriously, or;
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a false climate justice movement that tramples over indigenous peoples’ rights to their land to make way for more extraction, militarism, ecological destruction, “greenwashing”, and more of the same unfettered capitalism
We can all agree on which vision of climate justice makes the most sense, lest other indigenous peoples’ struggles around the world succumb to the same fate that befell the Artsakh Armenians.
COP29 approved by the UNFCCC, is being held now in Azerbaijan one year after an ethnic cleansing of 120,000 indigenous Armenians. Can we really trust these states to bear their citizens’ interests regarding climate justice and sustainability in mind? As sea waters begin to rise and swallow up indigenous island communities? As climate change projections forsee massive crop failures that will surely imperil many of the world’s communities? As states allow a genocide in Palestine to continue unabated, with over 85,000 tons of bombs having been dropped? This surpasses the amount of explosives used in World War II – killing tens of thousands of people, if not more – and is releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere? And not to mention how the host of COP29, Azerbaijan, along with partner state Turkey currently supplies the Israeli military with 40% of their oil to commit said genocide.
We at Ararat Collective have released a statement in opposition to COP29 as well as COP as an institution. It is our view that COP has been co-opted by green capitalism which does not seek systemic change. Rather it gives lip service to the world community’s concerns about climate change and sustainability but does little to next to nothing to create actual workable solutions to provide a sustainable future for us all.
Azerbaijan’s purported “Green Energy Zone” perfectly encapsulates the kind of world COP will usher in: one where militarism and colonial adventuring are legitimized to further the extraction and wealth accumulation at the expense of human life, natural preservation and our collective futures.
We see the only path forward being through a decolonial ecology. One that transcends the constraints of capitalism and takes into account the inequities and unequal access to resources with respect to the world’s communities, rather than our current system where countries like Azerbaijan exploit these inequities under the paradigm of “resource extraction by any means possible”.
While we at Ararat Collective do not view COP as a legitimate forum advancing climate justice and sustainability, we are still very much aware that Azerbaijan will use its status as host this year to promote its image abroad, further its business interests, and further entrench itself within the leading forces of the global capitalist structure and its power brokers.
Our fight against this destructive system is ongoing . We must organize and work together to topple it. We must avoid a world in which an institution like COP gets to claim ownership over the discourse and action on climate justice and sustainability. For they will always be subject to or held captive by a capitalist ethos the global elites and heads of state seek to promote. As such, the only solutions that will arise out of this forum will be ones entirely contained within the domain of “green” capitalism.
We call on all comrades to raise their voices against this conference, its capitalist ethos, as well as the fake “green” agenda peddled by Azerbaijan and its partners which undermines the goal of sustainability and shifts the attention away from the real problems and solutions.
If you are interested in reading our statement, you can find it on our Instagram page (ararat_berlin). May the fight for climate justice and real sustainability continue!
